We appreciate the enormous support that our ABestWeb community has experienced over the many years it has served its members and sponsors. We have decided to exit this business and have placed the property up for sale and we are actively entertaining interest.

In the meantime, community members will be able to read but not post to ABestWeb beginning on Jan. 18.

We want to thank you for your numerous contributions and your ongoing support. If you have any questions, please let us know.

"Yahoo! will end the development of the AltaVista and AlltheWeb search engines, but will keep the sites. Yahoo! did need a search engine. Yahoo! had found that searchers preferred regular search engine results to hand picked directory listings. Regular search results at the Yahoo! site was therefore delivered by Google. As a long term strategy it does not make sense to rely on your main competitor in this way. Yahoo! clearly needed an alternative, and bought the three search engines. However, the costs would be enormous to keep three different development teams developing three different search engines and it would make more sense to try to merge the competences acquired, even if there were cultural differences and geographical distances (The AlltheWeb team is in Norway). Overture had already started integrating the development teams of old timer AltaVista and the Norwegian AlltheWeb search engine. It is now clear that Yahoo! decided to go one step further, and replace the old search engines with a brand new one: the Yahoo! search engine. In February Yahoo! replaced Google with the new search engine at their own Yahoo! portal. The new search engine showed great similarities with the old Inktomi search engine, as many of the listings where the same. The search engine algorithm -- i.e. the process that decide the order of search results -- was new, however, and the fact that Yahoo! sent out a new search engine robot crawling the Net for sites and pages proved that Yahoo! was indeed building a new search engine. Yahoo! had been criticized for sticking to Google for too long. It now, appears that they had been biding their time, testing the new search technology. It would have been suicide for Yahoo! to launch a search service that did not deliver the quality their users have come to expect. Google has proved, once and for all, that the quality and relevance of search results is essential for success in this market. So what will happen to the old search engines? We have had our doubts about the quality of the Inktomi search engine. By all means, it could deliver decent results, but has been plagued by spam and irrelevant listings. AltaVista, once the king of the hill, continues to deliver good results, even if the database is a bit small. AlltheWeb, on the other hand, has proved itself worthy as Google's match, both as regards relevance and scope. It is therefore with a certain sadness we have to announce that the AltaVista and AlltheWeb search engines are going to die. In the near future Yahoo! will replace these unique search engines with data from the new Yahoo! search engine. Yahoo! will keep the two sites as experimental portals. Hence there will be differences as regards the support for advanced searching etc. But the core technology will be new. The Inktomi search engine never had its own portal. It now delivers data to sites like MSN and HotBot. Whether it also will be replaced by Yahoo! search is unclear at the moment, but most likely. Was this really necessary? Did Yahoo! need three search engines in order to develop a new one? Probably not. We guess the original plan was to develop Inktomi into the new "Google killer". Yahoo! soon realized, however, that they also needed a third service, in addition to the old Yahoo! directory and the new Yahoo! search engine -- a service that could bring in real money. They therefore bought Overture, the most important pay-per-click text ad search engine in the world. As an added bonus they got AlltheWeb and AltaVista and a lot of clever search programmers and marketers. By doing so, they also stopped MSN from buying these technologies, thus forcing Bill Gates & Co. to develop a brand new search engine from scratch."

Another great exercise in paying top dollar for something and then shutting it down.

In other words, Yahoo are going to get rid of two SEs that feature primarily free results and replace them with paid listings. While at the same time laughing at the recent customers of Inktomi who fell for Yahoo's bait and switch scam.

Yep ...Yep ...and Yep. Buy up the minor competitors, drain their techie elites from the SE job pool, and whalla. More SE monopoly. Paid Search listings + Ad Network Monopolies + Controlled PPA affiliate networks = total control of the merchant/advertiser Budgets. Now the only thing the Ad Whores need to do is figure out how to drain those budgets and feed the IAB/DMA members the clickstream data and fresh e-mail addresses.

Nice neat package assuring the monopolists, and their cadre, rake in the advertising mindset bucks. Only real benefit to come to normal affiliates will be Phase II. The complacent real merchants bean counters uncover they've been had if the BHO's whack the paid traffic with a double dipped commission fees...

Screw all these folks and concentrate on the one enity they can't control. The most powerful force in control of their mouse demanding gorrilla marketers get whacked out of the mix. Build your pages to address the shoppers currently on your site, and focus his click to a merchant's page that converts better then SE traffic....IMHO

Why do you think I chose the "Duck" icon and put the "parrot" into the mix. Warning from the get go to Duck and expect repeat parroted rants to pound home the points!

Mike & Charlie ...

"Payment is one option that isn't negotiable. Merchants require it for purchases ...SO DO WE."

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Dynamoo:
Another great exercise in paying top dollar for something and then shutting it down.

In other words, Yahoo are going to get rid of two SEs that feature primarily free results and replace them with paid listings. While at the same time laughing at the recent customers of Inktomi who fell for Yahoo's bait and switch scam.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Sums it up very nicely.

The only good thing to come from this for me is that my sites do much better on Inktomi / Yahoo than in Google.

I noticed a dropoff in visitors when Yahoo switched over to Google. I was never able to get Google to like my sites for some reason or other, but now that Yahoo is not using them, my Yahoo search rankings seem a lot better.

Another word of Yahoo was said by Tim Mayer of Yahoo:"...where veteran members discuss blackhatand cloaking spam seo techniques freely, newer members use these techniques on their own sites and then get banned.